"She called us beautiful"

 Beautiful people, that's what she said.  That was all she said.  For a good five minutes the room was filling with end of residency.  And the energies.

  Beautiful people.  Us.  All.

  Covered in wars and diggings, downpour and static air, cross cultural layers, and with tools to define boundary.

  People putting markers on folding chairs, loved ones to come!

  Mine!  Yours!  Two people walking around swapping articles of clothing.  Performance Art?  Someone asked so no answer was given.

  Having survived semester was accomplishment.  Beautiful people.  

  An invitation, Your Presence Requested, sketch of a person in mirror, drawing self.

  The sense that it might be a spoof.  How could classwork make a master?  Commence doing life.  This piece of paper says,

  Many of us left that semester born in our call.  Others had parents and siblings come to help reconnect images of self with family.  People were chucking whole "homes" out the windows into dumpsters.  A Rwandan male student cried.  Ebony porcelin teapot, Does the world only want our tears?

  

  Postcards written before the parting.

  Semester college.  One summer I couldn't wait to get home to my parents' slip and slide; the next I was unfit to go to their home!

  I could not utter a curse-free sentence for the rage/outrage, and could only sputter bits and pieces of a dissertation.  I could draw memorized maps of the world but couldn't, apparently, write my way out of a bag.  Didn't YOU get the memo¿?

  "What did it say?"

  'The Cold War is over.'

  The dorm door slammed so hard the photo show someone had installed along the hallway went crooked.

  I thought it wasn't a war, my voice came out of chest so tight I sounded like Mickey Mouse.  Fallaci's legs were crossing all the string in a can boundary markers on the sports field.  I couldn't keep up with so much.

  Weeks later we were being let out of a city building.

  Are you the medical attention?  I asked of a blueblack clad in a sort of leather catcher's mitt.

  Ladies, I want you to go directly down these stairs

  I CAN'T MOVE

  When you get yourselves up and ready for the day, go directly down these stairs to Decom

  Decom???

  I cannot move, my legs, LaRA

  Yes sir, I said staring at the machine gun held in perfectly upright script position.